walls and glass doors with
tiny panes which exasperated Desnoyers, who longed for the complicated
carvings and rich furniture in vogue during his youth. He himself
directed the arrangement and furnishings of the various rooms which
always seemed empty.

Chichi protested against her father's avarice when she saw him buying
slowly and with much calculation and hesitation. "Avarice, no!" he
retorted, "it is because I know the worth of things."

Nothing pleased him that he had not acquired at one-third of its value.
Beating down those who overcharged but proved the superiority of the
buyer. Paris offered him one delightful spot which he could not find
anywhere else in the world--the Hotel Drouot. He would go there every
afternoon that he did not find other important auctions advertised in
the papers. For many years, there was no famous failure in Parisian
life, with its consequent liquidation, from which he did not carry
something away. The use and need of these prizes were matters of
secondary interest, the great thing was to get them for ridiculous
prices. So the trophies from the auction-rooms now began to inundate
the apartment which, at the beginning, he had been furnishing with such
desperate slowness.

His daughter now complained that the home was getting overcrowded. The
furnishings and ornaments were handsome, but too many . . . far too
many! The white walls seemed to scowl at the magnificent sets of chairs
and the overflowing glass cabinets. Rich and velvety carpets over
which had passed many generations, covered all the compartments. Showy
curtains, not finding a vacant frame in the salons, adorned the doors
leading into the kitchen. The wall mouldings gradually disappeared
under an overlay of pictures, placed close together like the scales of
a cuirass. Who now could accuse Desnoyers of avarice? . . . He was
investing far more than a fashionable contractor would have dreamed of
spending.

The underlying idea still was to acquire all this for a fourth of its
price--an exciting bait which lured the economical man into continuous
dissipation. He could sleep well only when he had driven a good bargain
during the day. He bought at auction thousands of bottles of wine
consigned by bankrupt firms, and he who scarcely ever drank, packed his
wine cellars to overflowing, advising his family to use the champagne as
freely as ordinary wine. The failure of a furrier induced him to buy for
fourteen thousand francs pelts